Apprentice has been good to me. My old roommate (but not technically yet my roommate) altran introduced us to one another in 1997 or 1998. In college I gamed maybe 50 hours a week, with much of that time devoted to Constructed Magic. But in the hours that I wasn’t crashing my Granger Guildmages into Mogg Fanatics or thanking my lucky stars that Jolrael’s Centaur was going to block Ironclaw Orcs Every Single Time, Even If He Had An Incinerate, in real life, Apprentice was there for me.
I usually got out of class in the early afternoon and would play at Out of Time Comics almost every day. We’d break for dinner and then go to al and Tuna’s for more gaming. After a draft or perhaps a few hours of R/W Prison against Ihsan’s Shade Necropotence, we’d play Super Mario Kart or Goldeneye. On some nights I would actually go drinking with the young lady who worked in the commissary downstairs or turn down a date* from – believe it or not – the then-girl of my dreams (in order to play Type II, natch)… but rolling back to the apartment at two AM, I’d still have a roommate ready to shuffle up B/R Necropotence v. Cuneo Blue.
But even the numerous friends and roommates at my beck and call back in college were not enough to satiate my neverending hunger to test Constructed Magic. I had altran at the height of his powers, when he was dominating the PT_Q_ scene in the Northeast, but al had a girlfriend and never took the spellcasting as seriously as I did, even when he was winning. Those were the nights when Apprentice did its thing. How else was an English major in Philadelphia going to shuffle up against Pat Chapin a time zone away?
A year later, when I was exiled to Ohio, Apprentice was my one link to what mattered. I won three PTQs during my law school twenty-third year, with every minute of testing done via the virtual cards, an annoying metal click the signifier for the shuffle. After winning the last PTQ in Michigan in the early hours of Easter Sunday, I had only two weeks to prepare for PT: New York 1999 (and actually had to have my Civil Procedure exam moved). I designed a Top 32 deck entirely via nine hours of Apprentice per day, most of them sparring with my faraway teammate at Columbia U, Pat “PatrickJ” Johnson, the master of Grim Monolith and Morphling, with the first run of Family Guy providing background noise. Later I worked with Lan D. Ho in the paramount Survival v. Necropotence matchup, that battle of super powered titans for Regionals 1999 that only Hatred could win.
Years later, when sleek new Prius MODO first appeared on the scene, I was loyal to the veritable stone tablets of Apprentice. I remember one day at Neutral Ground, perhaps during a Judgment draft involving Trained Pronghorns, those oddly satisfying yet inefficient Tireless Tribes, that Chris Pikula asked to start testing with me online. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s Apprentice.” Chris, who had become spoiled via Magic Online declined. “Nah,” said the Meddling Mage. “I have to remember to untap myself on that game.”
But I remained a loyal Apprentice. The program helped me test with Josh as he started to transcend the PTQ loser stage, with Kibler as he began his second run. This past year, Apprentice and I have had our most productive collaborations ever. During the 2004 Championship Deck Challenge I put reinvigorated the Mono-Blue Control archetype that has lingered in one form or another since States. Without Apprentice I wouldn’t have been able to tune the Red Deck Wins and later B/G decks that I liked so much for the last Extended PTQ season. Certainly Kuroda-style Red would have never seen the light of tournament play in either of its forms without the ease and efficiency of Apprentice testing… And yet, I’ve had this nagging desire to “upgrade” to MODO in the back of my mind for months.
Before last week, I had literally only ever run the program twice. The first time was in the summer of 2002, fairly early. Using the Free Trial, I drafted a powerful U/W deck splashing Swirling Sandstorms – then my Weapon of Choice ™ – and expected to start down the “infinite” road that had been hinted at for weeks by my even casually professional friends. But facing a fairly weak aggressive deck, the worst happened. Apparently I don’t know my phases or steps, because I thought my mid-combat Teroh’s Vanguard would ruin him… and yet, it appeared that I had no opportunity to block.
The loss was an embarrassing one – though no one had seen it but me – and, frustrated, I was done with MODO for three years.
The next time I played, it was under the tutelage of my friend Jon Becker, who was trying to help teach me the interface so that I wouldn’t have the same problem again. With a great deck and a guaranteed kill in maybe two or three turns, my opponent in an 8-Man draft decided to start playing the dreaded timing tricks that bleed a less experienced player’s clock in order to win a hopeless match. I had taken a lot of time in my maneuvers, not knowing the optimal stops, and he was successful. One millisecond before lethal damage would go on the stack, I got the loss. This left me pissed again, and I didn’t touch the damn thing for ten months.
Luckily for me, I eventually gave MODO another shot.
The first night last week, I mana burned for a combined 14 life over three matches; won them all. I still haven’t gotten the hang of everything, and in Extended the other night, I accidentally tapped all my opponent’s mana with Mindslaver on his upkeep… and just conceded out of exhaustion. I intended to Upheaval his board, discard all his spells, and fail to play a land from his side, while setting myself up with land into Divining Top, a nice mix of mana and spells, two Eternal Dragons in my ‘yard, and two Purges on top of my deck… but it didn’t seem worth playing through the game having made the upkeep flub, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I was going to win anyway. Not at two AM.
In any case, even one or two weeks of MODO has taught me a lot. BDM has been trying to get me to use it seriously since we met Lucas Glavin back at Grand Prix: Boston. Lucas should be the poster boy of MODO babies. He cut his teeth almost entirely on the virtual interface, and has an understanding of timing rules that matches his design ability. I don’t care what Osyp says; Lucas is the game’s most underappreciated deck designer. I remember being genuinely impressed during the Last Battle of the Neutral Ground / Your Move Games Grudge Match, when Lucas beat David Chung in YMG’s only victory ever. It was the Psychatog mirror match and Lucas sacrificed his Cephalid Coliseum with Chung’s Upheaval on the stack. Two of the three cards he discarded were Circular Logics. I sighed, glanced over at our Champion and thought, “This can’t be good.”
Here are the Top Five Things I Learned Playing MODO For One Week:
1. The Casual Play / Tournament Practice room is a good litmus test for a deck.
There are two broad schools of deck practice. I generally practice “real” predicted matchups, generally rogue v. established archetype, with no deviations or interesting cards whatsoever out of the established deck. I test fastidiously, allowing take-backs in order to assess how good a deck is, and allow walking backwards whole turns in order to explore how a game “could have gone” in order to maximize my understanding of an important matchup.
The other school of testing is what I think of as “The MikeyP.” Before a big tournament, Mike will show up at Neutral Ground and battle anyone with a Type II deck. Mike is a stern playtest partner, never allowing a take-back. Though he is trying to assess the virtues of his deck, he is also testing the players involved, honing the ability that made him a Grand Prix, Masters, and Pro Tour Champion. I generally dislike Doctor Pustilnik’s methodology because I don’t think it emphasizes certain important and predictable elements of real tournament play, namely the focus on the statistically predictable behaviors of the netdecker. On the other hand, it does approximate what some “real” opponent might “really” bring to an event in a way that testing last week’s Top 8 PTQ decks doesn’t.
MODO testing is very much like Mike’s method, a refreshing departure from the methodology that I used to tune my decks over the past several months and for years before. I tested all three relevant Constructed formats in the fires of the Casual Play area, and my varying successes there taught me quickly which decks were good and which were not. For example, my Kamigawa Block deck, which I had aggressively tested in Apprentice already in anticipation for an upcoming PTQ, which I knew beat both White Weenie and Gifts Ungiven, never lost a single 2-out-of-3 match with anyone on MODO. But my “new” Type II deck, in which I tried to hybridize Mirrodin Block-style U/G elements with Brett Blackman’s most recent Beacon Green from the JSS was a pile. Given my relative successes in both Block and Extended, simply trading matches in the Casual Play room with the Type II indicated an inferior attempt.
On the other hand, I was able to tune the same colors and core competencies into a much better deck after a few nights.
2. I can’t buy a game with Affinity.
I built what I thought would be a superb prototype deck for the upcoming Extended Pro Tour. I didn’t have any Ravnica cards (obviously), but I didn’t suppose that an Invasion-esque multicolor set would have much to contribute to a deck of mostly artifacts anyway. In any case, I assumed I already had plenty of out-of-block additions with Umezawa’s Jitte for the other guy’s Disciple of the Vault and Pithing Needle for their Pernicious Deeds.
But apparently every player on Magic Online got the Affinity memo. Literally the friendliest deck I faced in Extended testing had maindeck Akroma’s Vengeance for me. After winning a squeaker against turn 2 Akroma, Angel of Wrath, I was greeted with Careful Study-into-Kataki, War’s Wage-into-Life/Death for Akroma in the second and third games.
Who Hard-Casts Kataki, War’s Wage In The Same Deck As Rorix Bladewing?
Zvi says that The Rule for a new Constructed format is to always play the best deck. Does this rule hold true if you can’t take a match with what you think is the best deck in a Casual Play room?
Embarrassingly [for Affinity] my “updated” U/G Threshold deck with Circular Logic (yuck) and Umezawa’s Jitte (shrug) has never lost, while my Onslaught Block-esque White Control with Mindslaver and Sensei’s Divining Top has been kicking much boo-tay… up until that Global Ruin, Bringer of the Black Dawn, another Global Ruin run.
3. MODO testing is ponderous, at best.
I try to limit my Magic Online time to two hours per day, maximum, which doesn’t really leave enough time for even eight-mans (I have only been playing in the Casual Room so far). However certain matchups swallow an hour or more each. People don’t scoop. You can be drawing three cards per turn after ‘Slavering them twice, knowing they’ve got nothing but lands in hand, and they will try to save a counter for your Goblin Charbelcher… a card that you certainly don’t have in your Mono-White Eternal Dragon deck.
4. I have been cheating for years; corollary: I am a filthy liar still.
The other night I played an Eternal Witness with no cards in my graveyard. I intended to sacrifice my Sakura-Tribe Elder at some point and recurse it… but never got a chance. Apparently I pass priority when the Eternal Witness goes on the stack, and if the opponent passes it into play and I haven’t got any Snake Shaman in my graveyard yet, there isn’t any point when I can say waitaminute and sacrifice it before the Eternal Witness’s comes into play effect intends to target.
Who knew?
Can you figure out why the latter is true?
5. I can’t stop.
Somebody, please, take my computer.
After trying to get me to substitute MODO as my testing tool for years, Josh actually asked me to stop this week. “You’re getting a big head,” he said, after my ninetieth “I won all my Block matches… again,” IM the other day. This might not seem significant to you, given my reputation in certain circles, but I have been close friends with the Rabbit for half a decade – his adult life in its entirety to date – and though we started road tripping before he had ever made a PTQ Top 8, Josh has never, once, accused me of fat-headedness before MODO.
“It’s like this,” said the recent Nationals Top 8 competitor. “What is your win percentage in the first round of a PTQ? 90%? You’ve got that matchup.”
He had a point. MODO is in a sense far from the perfect testing tool. The reason that I was able to work so effectively in testing new and templated Constructed decks this year is that I could use my time with great efficiency. Via Apprentice, I could create a huge volume of data, and would typically test a ten game matchup in between getting up and taking my shower on any random morning. The same amount of time won’t add up to a single match on MODO.
But you know what? It’s fun.
Don’t get me wrong, I still like Apprentice. I can fall into Apprentice testing the same way that I like doing probability and statistics problems, or reading feminist or Jesuit apologetics. Good maybe, productive in a sense, mind-expanding certainly, but not fun, per se.
At Regionals this year, after my embarrassing “I don’t have to block your Kokusho” decision in the first round, I asked my friend Don Lim how I could get better. I was building the best decks of my career, and playing, in a sense, more Magic than ever… But it was Magic without stakes.
“When I was good,” Don advised, “I played in tournaments constantly. Your problem is that you make mistakes and you don’t know what to do. If you have your tournament game, you get punished for mistakes, you know what happens, it sucks, and you try not to make them.”
MODO isn’t quite the same as playing in real tournaments – though I’m sure I’ll get there eventually – but it does force a different kind of game than playtest, regardless of whether it’s on Apprentice, in real life, or who the playtest partner is. Like MikeyP’s testing methodology, MODO can be unrelenting. It’s frustrating to make errors, even when they’re based on not knowing what phase you are in – mistakes that would never genuinely get made in real life. The thing is, I care whether I win or not. I look for really tight plays in order to beat up my unknown opponents, and am happy enough to spam my friends with IMs when I win.
All in all, I will probably continue to use both Apprentice and MODO for my virtual Magic. I will continue to use Apprentice – I hope, anyway – to build and tune decks… But I’ll use MODO to improve my own ability. More than that, I’ll use MODO for that Timmy rush that can be approximated only by annihilating another human being in an environment that feels more-or-less real. I never once got that buzz from an E-League event.
I know this article is a little bit different, but Teddy Cardgame thought it would be a fun and informative departure. If you liked it, heap praise in the forums; if you didn’t like it, send hate mail to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2.
LOVE
MIKE
* Bonus Section:
Recently my old friend Charles “Tuna” Hwa moved back to New York to work with me in the glamorous world of Internet Telephony Sales and Marketing. Last week I revisited the night of his birthday in 2000, where rather an embarrassing flub concerning a gorgeous blonde was made… but long before that night, in 1998, I was already tuning up the skills that would allow me to consistently choose tournament Magic over “improbably attractive**” women, month in and month out until the summer of 2001.
The year was 1998. I was taking an advanced writing seminar with McArthur Genius Susan Stewart in the second semester of my senior year. In the same class was a beautiful sophomore I had met casually a year earlier. She was a brilliant writer who would go on to win lit prizes at Penn and Yale and NYU, who would take the only writing fellowship at Tisch three years later. But in March of 1998 she was merely the pretty and serious brunette given to calling me The Poet in the third person, using words that sounded capitalized in that language properly spoken and more importantly understood only by twentysomething humanities scholars; on my birthday she would bring an Entenmann’s chocolate cake, frosted with the words “Hey Mike, Happy Birthday!” etched in green sugar.
The Thursday before Spring Break, which I would spend foolishly at Disney Land, she asked me to dinner. Now I quite fancied her but didn’t want to seem out of control… I wanted two Islands untapped at all times… Okay, the real reason I declined was that I had a Type II tournament set up for that night, as I wanted to get my rating up and assumed I’d be printing points. “No worries,” I thought. “I can always start seeing her after Spring Break.”
Of course by then she was swallowed up by some opportunistic and much more aggressive boyfriend, which, bad enough as it was, seems much worse given the results of the Standard tournament for which I had declined her invitation. Though he did not know the back story at the time, that didn’t prevent my friend Tuna from penning one of the most celebrated humor pieces of Magic’s Usenet era, The Ballad of Mighty Flores.
Sadly, she was not the last ball I dropped in favor of sixty card shuffling.
** ™ Brian David-Marshall